Salmoneus wrote: ↑Mon Oct 14, 2019 6:46 am
I'm not sure what relative clauses have to do with this anyway. There is no relative clause in "I made that"!
As for marking... is there marking normally? North sea west germanic languages (as this clearly seems to be, despite being called 'crimean') aren't noted for their super-strong morphological retention at the best of times.
This language is hardly a north sea language, and it cannot be: it shares several isoglosses with Biblical Gothic and other East Germanic languages, such as the raising of ē
1 > ī (as opposed to WGmc lowering to ā) and the dental reflex of PGmc *jj > -d- as commonly cited in
ada. Other retentions such as the preservation of PGmc -*z as -s (schuos, fers) and the dental fricative in goltz as least suggest an early divergence from Common Germanic.
If this language is a "North Sea Germanic" language, then it could only have split before many of the features common to North Sea Germanic (or Plattdietsch or whatever) became apparent... I can only cite a-mutation and -ð- fortition as common isoglosses with the former that happened relatively early, possibly before the migration of the Goths to the Crimea (perhaps late 3rd century). Of course these innovations might be due to convergent evolution than genetic relationship.
Anyway, small rant over...
You are probably right, and I suggested that there might not have been person marking here, especially given that Crimean Gothic seems to reduce many vowels to schwa — for whats it worth, I preserve person marking in my conlang.
And would it be written if it were there? This isn't a scholarly transcription but an impressionistic one, and the differences would likely be small.
Dutch has - for the 1s, -t for the 2s/3s, and -en for the plural; but the -t is dropped in the past tense (there's a different -te to mark past tense). Low German has -st for 2s, but has -t for all the plurals. Frisian is the same but with -e for the plural. English has -s for 3s and - for everything else.
I agree. And if we take the corpus at face value, it seems to align closest to Dutch here, unless the /s/ in the 2nd person was somehow elided. Which if person marking has been obscured, could have been buffered by resumptive pronouns (my theory at least, although it explains the -o in "tzo" as a schwa from reduction as a clitic.)
It's easy to imagine forms like "maltthata" being written just plain "malthata" by a non-native transcribing impressionistially.
You are probably right, and this has been suggested by at least one scholar. Alternatively, here the cluster [tθ] has been simplified to just [t].
Indeed, 'var-thata' for 'made that' would appear to already be missing both the -k of the root AND the -t of the past tense. I don't know if this means there was massive loss of consonants, or if it means that coda consonants were lost in clusters, or if it just means that whatever person wrote that down just couldn't hear coda consonants before /T/.
Addendum: This word seems to correspond to Biblical Gothic waurhta, which is the past tense form, so at least here there is no /k/. /h/ is elided everywhere in CrGo (c.f. [h]ano) I suggest something like waurt + þata with simplification of the cluster [tθ].
I don't think I was clear earlier, I want to know what might be the morphological or syntactical use of a clitic object pronoun, as is suggested by malthata, vvarthata, etc. (And my knowledge here isn't good.) I suggested it might be a relative pronoun introducing relative clauses, like English "that" is sometimes used for, but you are correct that "I made that" does not have this.
